Two short story reviews for the price of one blog view

The Player is another very good short story by Linda Johnson that puts you in arms reach of a psychopathic killer and his modis operandi. This could have easily been extended with more interplay with the cops and the victim's family to heighten the tension and make the ending sharper. It was a bit too straight on and in need of a few more curves. The last sentence confused me for a while, but any story that makes me remember it long after reading it (and I read it over a month ago), makes me bump this up a notch. The Player slips into the low "5" range for a short story. Job well done.

Delightfully Departed is a nice, short read, about a 'justifiable' rant and its consequences, but there's really not much to make a reader sit up and take notice even with an epilogue. And I'm not sure a story that is probably no more than 2,000 words long needs an epilogue. A story of this length needs more, a cruel twist of fate, more counter-punching, something even more ironic in the ending than what was dished out. This is average fare--a "3".